Borderline

Film historians say Kenneth Macpherson's movie was fifty years ahead of its time in terms of subject matter. The Scottish filmmaker's only feature film could have never been produced in Hollywood at the time, let alone seen nationwide distribution to theaters, especially in the South. His silent film, October 1930 "Borderline," was a mix of experimental and avant garde elements, with a heavy dose of Sergei Eisenstein-type montage editing.

To film such a bold movie, cinema's first look at black/white love relationships, took financial resources most filmmakers don't have. Macpherson married into money in 1927 when he linked up with a shipping magnate's daughter, Annie Ellerman, an English writer known as Bryher. To say their marriage was not of the traditional kind is putting it mildly. It was more of an artistic alliance between the couple, with Annie favoring women while Kenneth loved both genders. Moving to Territet, Switzerland, soon after their wedding, the pair gathered other artists in the community to form the 'Pool Group.' Its members adopted the French and German experimental forms of art, frowning upon commercial formats for more expressive 'art forms,' centered on feelings rather than plot narratives.

After producing three short movies, Macpherson embarked on his first (and only) feature film. He remarkably was able to secure the acting services of African-American actor Paul Robeson, who was on the London stage at the time, and his wife, Eslanda. "Borderline" sees the pair renting a room upstairs from the owners of the house, a white couple. The two couples separately have affairs with the other, setting off a firestorm in the town after a murder takes place. The film is delivered by way of spare inter titles and relies on the actors' expressions rather than dialogue. Said film critic Richard Deming,"Macpherson's brilliance lies in his ability to photograph small movements as nuanced, meaning-producing gestures." A recent review claimed, "Judged on its own merits, Borderline is a ground-breaking work, dealing as it does with issues of race and sexuality at a time when such subject matter was still largely taboo and had only been previously tackled cinematically through oblique inference." Viewers used to traditional Hollywood movies were dumbfounded by Macpherson's feature film. One London newspaper reviewer recommended the filmmaker "spend a year in a commercial studio" before embarking on another project as complex as his "Borderline." The "Pool Group" leader was so stung by such negative criticism he withdrew the prints from distribution and gave up his ambitions to direct any movies in the immediate future.

"With high expectations I went along to the Academy Theatre on Monday to see "Borderline", a silent film produced by Kenneth MacPherson, editor of Close-Up, and starring Paul Robeson with his charming wife Eslanda. At the end I was dumbfounded. Mr MacPherson has apparently attempted to make a film story out of the amazingly suitable screen material provided by what is called "the negro question." No one could deny the possibilities of such a story. But Mr Macpherson buries his intentions in a conglomerate of weird shots and queer situations, worked out around a dissolute set of unsympathetic characters. He thinks too much of close-up and not enough of border-line. The result is a wholly unintelligible scramble of celluloidian eccentricity. The film is not, at the moment, being offered by any renter for public exhibition, though it is certified "A" by the B. B. F. C. I doubt if it will be. It is not for one moment entertaining, and only stimulates one's natural desire to see and hear Paul Robeson in a first-rate "British" talkie, made for the public. In a synopsis we are reminded among other biographical facts, that Kenneth Macpherson "is himself, you might say, border-line among the young cinema directors." Until he can do better than this for the box-office he is unlikely to be allowed over the border-line." (BIOSCOPE, 15 October, 1930)

Yes, and odd and confusing and a dozen other adjectives that make you think just what kind of movie this is!

This is not a movie for most people. It's more like an experience, an ahead-of-its-time extended music video. Most of the action is stifled, static and repressed. The images seem like set-pieces, paintings in time, feelings encased in poses. All which remind me of famous Greek director, Theo Angelopoulos and his static images - which were not static at all - since they housed emotions and a participation of audience in conjecturing what they were seeing by a process of mental elimination of causes and possible actions.

BORDERLINE - instead of being images of things, gazes at people and we are challenged to discover just what it is they are thinking. Mostly because the number of intertitles is scant and far between.

All this is to say -- this is not an easy film to watch. I enjoyed immersing myself in the images, however. The story is rather odd in itself - perhaps it was risqué for its time. In fact, I am sure that a biracial relationship was off-center for those times. As were its sexual undertones.

Indeed, I think the film's title is about the BORDERLINE type of lifestyle that these people wanted to live. And in turn, the consequences, emotional and social, which affected their decisions surrounding this.

This sort of "experimental" film has been done and redone thousands of times by professionals and film students during the 20th century. Perhaps never as compelling as in this film - which is a landmark of sorts for film buffs.

Yet, I repeat, not for everyone.

The film is really about the myriad psychological states that we go through during a relationship -- and racial prejudice is the juice that runs this study. But there are sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious moments of homosexual metaphor scattered throughout.

Don't watch this movie if you are in a hurry. The film won't go faster just because you want it to.

Intriguing but not altogether successful - but highly recommended for film buffs and Gothic types. Both in which I've dabbled through the years.

I saw Borderline several years ago on AMC. I've been looking for it ever since. It was haunting: visual, textural, sensual. This movie took me somewhere like a dream and I didn't care where. I will never forget the curtain blowing in the breeze. I still remember the way it made me tilt my head. I remember my facial expression when I saw it. I didn't know what had happened when the movie was over, but I find life is that way. It didn't bother me. The unfairness of the ultimate rejection of an innocent character strikes me as sadly real. I loved the faces, the way the camera dwelt upon them. The camera gazed at the set with the unfocused eyes of a daydreamer. Borderline was real to me in a way movies aren't. It was exactly the lack of explanation, color, sharpness that made it enter my consciousness like a thief in the night. I love this movie. Someday I will own it.

This little-seen experimental film definitely won't be to everyone's taste, but I was impressed by how modern it looked (apart from the lack of sound, it wouldn't have looked out of place in the late-1950s, early 1960s) and the bohemian atmosphere it created. The film makes very little use of intertitles, and so the story can be a little tricky to follow at times, but it isn't all that complicated and an attentive viewer should be easily able to fill in any gaps along the way.

Paul Robeson stars as the husband of a half-caste woman who has had an affair with a white man in a small village in Switzerland. She has ended the affair, but too late to save the marriage, and her lover – who is also married – is having trouble coming to terms with the split. The racial tolerance subject matter and message is fairly rare for the time, and is handled with a surprising amount of maturity. For the peripheral figures caught up in the fallout from the affair, life eventually continues unchanging, and the entire film is pervaded with an air of melancholia.

Although the story does drag a little at times, and the director's choice of shot is sometimes open to question, the look and feel of the film, and the way it brims with innovative ideas (for its time) make this worth watching.